Martin Richard, the 8-yr-old boy who was killed when two bombs detonated at the Boston Marathon, had recently made a sign in his class which expressed his feelings of sadness at the violence that took the life of Trayvon Martin.

Today, Trayvon Martin’s parents sent a message of support to Richard’s family, one grieving family to another.

While FOX News and GOP bigots spout their hatred against Muslims and immigrants in the wake of this tragedy (despite the fact that we do not yet know anything about who or what group was behind the bombing), here we see two families victimized by violence and hatred, reaching across racial and geographical space to express mutual solidarity, understanding, and compassion …

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Our hearts are broken over the tragedy in Boston yesterday. Our family sends our sincerest condolences to all of those who have been affected by this terrible situation.  We especially would like to send a message to the family of eight year old, Martin Richard.  We have come to understand that the peace sign that Martin is holding in a photo being circulated throughout the media, was created in response to a lesson by his teacher about the death of our son and the issue of violence. From our family to yours’, we are praying for you, thinking about you and will remember your son for the rest of our lives.

~Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin

how many cops are just as racist as this asshole, but simply don’t get caught being stupid enough to let photos be leaked of them using an image of a black teenager with a bag of skittles as target practice … ???

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 … The fact that Trayvon was an unarmed high school student, murdered on his way home from a trip to the store to buy candy, helped stir the tremendous sympathy for him. Subsequent efforts by racist defenders of Zimmerman to make Trayvon out to be a drug user and a delinquent failed in the face of evidence that Trayvon was a good student with no criminal history and a loving son.

But what if he hadn’t been? Among the Black people who are murdered by vigilantes or cops, as among the population at large, are those with criminal records, and with problems at school, work and home.

Such records and problems don’t justify neighborhood watch racists or law enforcement acting as judge, jury and executioner in the streets. It is the role of anti-racists to build a movement to demand justice for victims of racist violence, regardless of the circumstances of their lives.

 … That it took mass rallies and marches across the country for weeks to push Obama to acknowledge Trayvon’s murder should be a lesson: Instead of waiting for Obama to lead a fight against racism, we need to do so ourselves. Protest won’t guarantee a response from Obama or any politician, but it’s clear that they won’t acknowledge racism at all if we don’t protest.

Our movement, however, shouldn’t be guided by how to gain the attention of those in positions of political power. Rather, we need to consider the question of how to build the greatest possible mobilization against racism.

Throughout the past, the only force that has achieved major victories against institutionalized racism—winning the right to vote, creating social programs like affirmative action to ameliorate the effects of racism and poverty, desegregating the schools, colleges and universities—has been mass struggle.

The fact that it took weeks of protest just to win the simple victory of getting Trayvon’s murderer arrested shows for certain that the struggle against racism isn’t outdated simply because a Black president sits in the White House. One year after Trayvon’s murder, our fight against racism is still just beginning.

SHOT TO death while taking in his family’s trash cans.

The circumstances surrounding the murder of 13-year-old Darius Simmons don’t appear to be in question. On May 30, the Black Milwaukee teenager became another victim of racism in the U.S.

Darius and his family had lived in their home only a month before the teenager was fatally shot by his next-door neighbor, 75-year-old John Spooner. According to reports, Darius’ mother, Patricia Larry, had moved because she wanted her son to grow up in a safer neighborhood. According to family members, Darius was a funny, loving kid who rode his bike more than seven miles to school each day.

On May 30, Darius was home sick from school when he went outside to retrieve the family’s garbage cans from in front of their house. There, he was confronted by Spooner, who apparently believed Darius had been involved in a break-in of his home earlier in the week, during which several guns were stolen. According to his mother, Darius was in school when the break-in occurred.

Spooner confronted the teen, telling him he “wanted his shotguns back,” according to Darius’ mother, who watched the argument unfold. Spooner then pulled out a handgun and shot Darius twice—even as the teen held up his arms and tried to run away. When the police arrived on the scene, Spooner allegedly admitted, “Yeah, I shot him.”

Spooner has since been charged with first-degree homicide and is being held on $300,000 bond. Just an hour before he killed Darius, Spooner ate breakfast with local Alderman Bob Donovan, where he talked about the break-in.

Donovan told WISN reporter Marianne Lyles, “I asked [Spooner], ‘Did you call the police?’ He said, ‘Yeah,’ but for whatever reason, seemed a little frustrated with that investigation. I don’t know the details of it.”

Donovan added, “He did say that ‘maybe there are other ways of dealing with this’”—suggesting the shooting may have been premeditated.

Compounding the tragedy, Patricia Larry says that she was detained for questioning in a squad car for two hours after the shooting and was unable to go the hospital to be with her son as he was dying.

And during the investigation of the crime, police reportedly decided to search Darius’ home—and arrested his older brother for truancy tickets.

MORE THAN 100 San Francisco Bay Area activists and members of the Black community in Oakland, Calif., came together May 12 for a march for justice for Alan DeWayne Blueford, an 18-year-old high school senior gunned down by Oakland police officers at midnight on May 6.

The march was led by several members of Alan’s family and began with a solemn moment of prayer led by his uncle, an ordained minister. But as soon as the march got underway, the tone turned immediately to righteous outrage.

With raised fists and a wheelchair-rigged sound system, marchers called out the racist and murderous practices of the Oakland Police Department (OPD), which has an infamous history of terrorizing Oakland’s Black communities. Chants of “Justice for Alan!” were interrupted by calls to “Jail the killer cops—now!” and to “Stop the war…on the Black community!” as well as “OPD, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!”

 … [Alan] and his friends were hanging out at 90th Avenue and Birch Street when two police officers, driving with their lights off, approached the three young men with their firearms drawn.

Fearing a confrontation, Alan ran about two blocks down Birch Street and stopped by a lamppost around some well-lit houses. The police officers fired three times into Alan’s body—including his stomach and leg. After those initial shots, witnesses report hearing a fourth shot. One police officer sustained a bullet wound to the foot and was rushed to the hospital.

The official OPD story changed several times. Initially, OPD-sponsored witnesses said “the suspect” was shooting at police, and that they “believed the young men had a concealed weapon.” Other stories included the claim that Alan died on the porch steps of a house, shooting into the air, and another that he was running down the street, firing randomly. It was later shown that Alan was killed under the lamppost where he had stopped.

The OPD also claimed that a gun was found 30 feet from the body, but forensics tests show Alan never fired a gun. The OPD’s website later admitted that the injured police officer’s wound was self-inflicted. He shot himself in the foot and was rushed to the hospital.

The original OPD story stated that Alan was also rushed to the hospital and succumbed to his wounds there, but the reality is that he was left in the street for more than four hours.

Wow. I didn’t realize quite how awful the politics behind World Socialist Website (i.e., Socialist Equality Party) actually are.

They go so far as to claim that Trayvon Martin’s murder was not a racist incident at all, and accuse other socialists of “identity politics” by ”attempting to present his murder as a racial issue”, rather than simply class.

Now this truly is “class-reductionism” and would be laughable if not for the seriousness of their crime of giving Marxism and socialism a bad name by virtue of their own stupidity, ignorance, and reckless sectarianism.

(Oh yeah, and their argument that the reason the ISO is talking about racism is because it’s trying to drum up support for Obama in the 2012 election is simply fantasy, as is evidenced by basically everything the ISO has written and done to oppose the Obama administration’s Wall Street-friendly, civil liberties-destroying, war-prone, anti-environment policies.)

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In the case of Trayvon Martin, the ISO is attempting to present his murder as a racial issue—an approach opposed by Trayvon’s parents—for the most crassly opportunist reasons. As the 2012 presidential election approaches, the ISO sees an opportunity to connect opposition to racism with support for Obama’s reelection.

This operation is already well underway. At an April 11 meeting sponsored jointly by the ISO and Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH coalition—under the banner “Trayvon Martin & The Fight Against The New Jim Crow”—Rainbow-PUSH representative Jeanette Wilson called on everyone “to go vote in the polls in November” for “progressive”—i.e., Democratic Party—politicians. Your own speaker, Keeanga-Yahahtta Taylor, adapted herself to Jackson’s reactionary politics. Her presentation did not contain a single reference to “class,” the “Democratic Party” or “Obama,” and concluded by denouncing the “rich white men” who run the country.

 … If an entire section of the population is criminalized under accepted and perfectly legal law enforcement policies, should it come as any surprise that police are prepared to shoot first and ask questions later?

The NYPD racks up more killings of unarmed Blacks and Latinos than other police forces because of its quasi-military character, its size and its quantity of armaments. But police across the U.S. follow the same pattern.

 … There’s no way to predict when and how a new anti-racist movement will take shape. But the elements are in place: a criminal justice system that continues to incarcerate African Americans on a mass scale; police who act as judge, jury and executioner in the streets; and now, thousands of activists across the U.S. who decided to take a stand for Trayvon Martin.

The struggle to win racial justice has a long history, and it has never been an easy one. But the murder of Trayvon Martin may well be the spark that ignites that movement once again.

NOT a “post-racial America” …

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Brian Beckman, a captain with the Miami Dade Fire-Rescue Department, had the chutzpah to tell his Facebook friends and the world just what he thinks about Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, African-American youth and their parents:

“The state seeks reelection again, truth aside. I and my coworkers could rewrite the book on whether our urban youths are victims of racist profiling or products of their failed, sh*tbag, ignorant, pathetic, welfare dependent excuses for parents, but like Mrs. Corey, we speak only the truth. They’re just misunderstood little church going angels and the ghetto hoodie look doesn’t have anything to do with why people wonder if they’re about to get jacked by a thug.”

These days it is not at all unusual to hear pundits on Fox Noise and other conservative commentators decry how the political left has turned the Trayvon Martin case into a “racial incident” because as we all know, race had absolutely nothing to do with George Zimmerman’s pursue and violently confronting an unarmed kid in a hoodie who was just minding his own business. Trayvon Martin had to be up to no-good; “those types” always are. That’s not racism, that’s just how it is!

(Video) Trayvon Martin & The Fight Against The New Jim Crow | Chicago Forum, 4/11/12 » 

 This is a discussion of how we can continue to build a fight against the New Jim Crow.

Co-Sponsored by Rainbow PUSH Coalition,
The International Socialist Organization
& The Campaign to End the Death Penalty

A panel discussion featuring the following speakers…

A message of Solidarity from Dr. John Carlos, the 1968 Olympian who raised his fist on the podium to protest racism and inequality in America.

Simeon Wright- cousin of Emmett Till and author of Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till

Martinez Sutton- brother of Rekia Boyd, young woman killed by an off-duty Chicago police officer on March 21, 2012

Bishop Tavis L. Grant- National Field Director of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition

Rev. Jeanette Wilson- Rainbow PUSH Coalition

Steven Watts- father of Stephon Watts, 15 year old killed by Calumet City Police on February 1, 2012

Wayne Watts- uncle of Stephon Watts

Allisah Love, of the Free Howard Morgan Campaign, Howard Morgan was shot 28 times by four white Chicago cops and was recently sentenced to 40 years in prison for the attempted murder of those four cops.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor- International Socialist Organization & columnist for SocialistWorker.org

(Video) Crazy racist white guy explains how Zimmerman was attacked by “a colored” and shot him in self-defense.

 Yeah. When you have this guy on your side, you know you are in the wrong.

Al Sharpton: “Had there not been pressure there would not have been a second look. This is not a night for celebration. This is a night that should not have happened in the first place.”

Family attorney: “We thank you to all those people who signed the petition to do something even if you didn’t know who Trayvon Martin…to all the high school students and young people who believed completely in justice, the idea, the dream, those are the people who are here today saying they can make a difference.”

Trayvon’s father: “Thank everyone once again…this is just the beginning and we will continue to have faith. From the first march we walked by faith. We will continue to march until the right thing is done.”

Zimmerman arrested. Still a long road ahead. Trying to get actual justice for people of color and poor people out of the U.S. criminal justice system is like trying to get the truth out of a pathological liar … We’ll see …

It’s about fucking time. I think we can also safely say that this wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for the massive protests that have been going on lately around this injustice.

Also, we have to see this thing through to the finish, as the American justice system, courts, and judges, have a long history of racist bias in their own right …

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Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey plans to announce as early as Wednesday afternoon that she is charging neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, according to a law enforcement official close to the investigation.

It was not immediately clear what charge Zimmerman will face.

‎’Zimmerman’s supporters insist that this case is not about race, so why were Zimmerman’s supporters moved to vandalize a black cultural center, and why is Zimmerman endorsing this?